The Numbers 0, 1, 32 And 450 Justify Whatsapp’s $19b Buyout

"Facebook acquires Whatsapp" does not sound as enticing, or interesting for that matter, as "Facebook acquires Whatsapp for $19 billion" does. You want to know why? Because it is all in the numbers, and at the end of every deal, what matters is who walked away with how much money. Facebook's epic buyout of Whatsapp, by all means, is bigger than any recent buyouts by Apple, Microsoft and Google put together. The enormous $19 billion takeover is not only sending ripples across the Silicon Valley, but it also raising questions on whether Whatsapp's buyout is worth that kind of money.

A company that has been on the map for just five years and has a 50-member team is worth every dime Zuckerberg dropped to purchase it. Wondering why and how? Let the numbers 0, 1, 32 and 450 tell you.

0 - Zero is the amount of money Whatsapp has spent till date on advertising and public relations. Yes, the world's most widely used messenger service has never advertised unlike is new peers WeChat and other such services. And zero is also the number of sponsored ads you see on Whatsapp. Here is where Whatsapp leaps ahead of its competitors. It was always ad-free and even after its takeover, it promises to be advertisement-free.

1 - One dollar, which translates to around Rs 60, is the amount of money users pay annually after their trial version expires. This is yet again a winning card for Whatsapp.

32 - Yes, that's the number of engineers who together manufactured this goliath of a messaging service. Further, this number breaks down to 1 engineer per 14 million users. This small but well knitted team of engineers put together an epic service which is available throughout 7 OS platforms with an unbelievable downtime.

450 (million) - 450 million people use Whatsapp everyday all over the globe. And that's a bigger number of users compared to Facebook, when it was 5-years-old. It's also reported that more than 1 million people install this app everyday. Plus, more than 70 per cent of the total users are online at any given point of time, whereas, other similar service providers have hardly been able to touch the 50 per cent mark.